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Friday, January 20, 2012

Alexa Noble: Scrap Paper Collage

Hi Everyone ... Happy New Year to you all!

This month our theme has been getting organized and using our scraps. I don't know about you, but I keep everything (just in case) which can get a little out of hand! Hopefully if you take a look at all this month's tutorials, you may get some ideas about how to reduce the pile and make some exciting projects.

I am going to show you how to position your scrap papers to get a fantastic textural and colourful result which you can use in all your art projects.

As we are looking at utilising things which are almost classed as waste (can I say that?!) I decided to make my project from recycled items and so I started with some jars left over from Christmas.

Choose papers with colours which broadly match your theme. For my first jar, I used a combination of text pages, old music, greens, browns, checks and blues.

Start by stamping your image(s) onto an old piece of scrap paper to give you a guide for which papers will appear in the various parts of your stamp. Cover them with PVA glue and then tear pieces of the scrap papers and place on the images. Glue papers to cover the entire image with room to spare.

Allow the glue to dry, and then re-stamp your images over your collage.

I painted mine with Croco base coat as it gives a great finish but you could leave them uncoated or use an alternative medium such as Mod Podge. If you are going to use a medium, make sure you stamped your image with a permanent ink so that it doesn't smudge.

Allow to dry and then cut out your images which will have fantastic background colour and texture!

I painted my jar with Fantasy Moon glass paint by Pebeo. I added sections of a chicken wire panel (Dustyattic) onto which I fixed my bees.

This technique of positioning your scraps is not just reserved for stamping. It can also be used with cutting machines and my second project shows how you can do this.

As before, choose your scraps with a theme in mind. I selected sea/beach elements and for added interest, all my scraps were from papers I had created myself. Rip and tear them as you like and stick them onto an old piece of paper using PVA. I painted mine with Croco once it was complete, but as before, this is optional.

Allow it to dry.

This collage piece can now be used in any cutting device.

Obviously, if you use a die cutting machine, it is very easy to position the page on the die to maximise the collage elements. However, it is also possible to use it in electronic cutting machines. I used my Cricut for this project and by moving the cutting head around my page, I was able to cut my elements on precise parts of the page.

I cut my beachy scene from all across my collage and them fixed them onto my jar which I had painted with turquoise glass bead gel.

I made a late night dash to the beach (which fortunately is only at the end of the road) to get some sand for the lid to which I also added some miniature shells, a sand dollar and the very lovely Octopet by Stampotique who are our sponsors for this month.

Why not dig down into that box of scraps, see what's lurking at the bottom and turn them into something wonderful?

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As of April 2012, Gingersnap Creations has transformed into a new blogozine, Unruly PaperArts, complete with tutorials, interviews, reviews, and unruly art and articles by our regular columnists and guest contributors. Come play our monthly Reader Art Quests and have your art featured in the next issue of UPA.